Generation of test cases from functional requirements. A survey

One of the major quality criteria of a software system is how well it fulfils the needs of users or customers. One technique to verify and improve the grade of fulfilment is system testing. System test cases might be derived from the requirements of the system under test. This paper presents the results of a survey among 13 approaches to drive the generation of test cases from functional requirements

An overview on test generation from functional requirements

Despite the fact that the test phase is described in the literature as one of the most relevant for quality assurance in software projects, this test phase is not usually developed, among others, with enough resources, time or suitable techniques. To offer solutions which supply the test phase, with appropriate tools for the automation of tests generation, or even, for their self-execution, could become a suitable way to improve this phase and reduce the cost constraints in real projects. This paper focuses on answering a concrete research question: is it possible to generate test cases from functional requirements described in an informal way? For this aim, it presents an overview of a set of relevant approaches that works in this field and offers a set of comparative analysis to determine which the state of the art is.Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia TIN2007-67843-C06 03Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia TIN2010- 20057-C03-0

An Industrial Case Study on Test Cases as Requirements

It is a conundrum that agile projects can succeed 'without requirements' when weak requirements engineering is a known cause for project failures. While Agile development projects often manage well without extensive requirements documentation, test cases are commonly used as requirements. We have investigated this agile practice at three companies in order to understand how test cases can fill the role of requirements. We performed a case study based on twelve interviews performed in a previous study. The findings include a range of benefits and challenges in using test cases for eliciting, validating, verifying, tracing and managing requirements. In addition, we identified three scenarios for applying the practice, namely as a mature practice, as a de facto practice and as part of an agile transition. The findings provide insights into how the role of requirements may be met in agile development including challenges to consider.Comment: Proceedings of XP 2015: 27-3

Security Attack Testing (SAT)—testing the security of information systems at design time

For the last few years a considerable number of efforts have been devoted into integrating security issues into information systems development practices. This has led to a number of languages, methods, methodologies and techniques for considering security issues during the developmental stages of an information system. However, these approaches mainly focus on security requirements elicitation, analysis and design issues and neglect testing. This paper presents the Security Attack Testing (SAT) approach, a novel scenario-based approach that tests the security of an information system at the design time. The approach is illustrated with the aid of a real-life case study involving the development of a health and social care information system

Exact analysis for requirements selection and optimisation

Requirements engineering is the prerequisite of software engineering, and plays a crit- ically strategic role in the success of software development. Insufficient management of uncertainty in the requirements engineering process has been recognised as a key reason for software project failure. The essence of uncertainty may arise from partially observable, stochastic environments, or ignorance. To ease the impact of uncertainty in the software development process, it is important to provide techniques that explicitly manage uncertainty in requirements selection and optimisation. This thesis presents a decision support framework to exactly address the uncertainty in requirements selection and optimisation. Three types of uncertainty are managed. They are requirements uncertainty, algorithmic uncertainty, and uncertainty of resource constraints. Firstly, a probabilistic robust optimisation model is introduced to enable the manageability of requirements uncertainty. Requirements uncertainty is probabilis- tically simulated by Monte-Carlo Simulation and then formulated as one of the opti- misation objectives. Secondly, a probabilistic uncertainty analysis and a quantitative analysis sub-framework METRO is designed to cater for requirements selection deci- sion support under uncertainty. An exact Non-dominated Sorting Conflict Graph based Dynamic Programming algorithm lies at the heart of METRO to guarantee the elim- ination of algorithmic uncertainty and the discovery of guaranteed optimal solutions. Consequently, any information loss due to algorithmic uncertainty can be completely avoided. Moreover, a data analytic approach is integrated in METRO to help the deci- sion maker to understand the remaining requirements uncertainty propagation through- out the requirements selection process, and to interpret the analysis results. Finally, a more generic exact multi-objective integrated release and schedule planning approach iRASPA is introduced to holistically manage the uncertainty of resource constraints for requirements selection and optimisation. Software release and schedule plans are inte- grated into a single activity and solved simultaneously. Accordingly, a more advanced globally optimal result can be produced by accommodating and managing the inherent additional uncertainty due to resource constraints as well as that due to requirements. To settle the algorithmic uncertainty problem and guarantee the exactness of results, an ε-constraint Quadratic Programming approach is used in iRASPA